With It's About You, first-time filmmakers Kurt and Ian Markus, a father and son team, have documented a swath of John Mellencamp's life on Super 8. Billy Corben's doc Square Grouper "paints a vivid portrait of Miami's pot smuggling culture in the 1970s and 1980s through three of the city's most colorful stories." The one new addition that's a North American rather than world premiere is Greg Mottola's Paul, featuring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost road-tripping and befriending an alien voiced by Seth Rogen. Which — sadly, we can delay no longer — leads us to…

This week Movieline announced that it's welcoming a new Chief Film Critic (a second one, that is, alongside Stephanie Zacharek): Elvis Mitchell, former critic for the New York Times and current host of KCRW's The Treatment. He probably would have preferred to kick off with a film other than The Green Hornet, which he rates a 4.5 on a scale of 10. "Seth Rogen as Britt Reid in a film directed by Michel Gondry sounded very promising," he writes. But "Hornet becomes that oddity — a film more fun to describe than to watch."

"The Green Hornet proves to be the sloppiest, most inept action franchise-launcher helmed by a frail visionary weirdo since Tim Burton's 1989 Batman," writes Vadim Rizov at GreenCine Daily. "At least on that production, Jack Nicholson ran interference for Burton, sparing him from the worst of Warner Bros' meddling. This is a film made by a director who is not allowed to be himself."

"The occasion of Michel Gondry's first 3D film should have been joyful," sighs the Telegraph's Tim Robey. "The handmade kookery of this director's movies (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind) could have led us to expect almost anything: ideally, he would bypass the digital process, and perhaps do it by lowering papier mâché birds between the audience and the screen, while running personally into the auditorium and squawking. Sadly, it was not to be."

"[I]n The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up Rogen partnered with Steve Carell and Paul Rudd," notes IFC's Matt Singer. "In Pineapple Express, he worked with the versatile James Franco. In Green Hornet, Rogen the producer saddled Rogen the actor with Jay Chou, a handsome Taiwanese pop star with a limited grasp of English. That leaves us with a buddy film starring an exceptional improviser and a guy who can't improvise because he can't speak the language. No surprise, then, that Hornet and Kato's friendship, so central to the plot of the film, feel forced and uneven."

"Like its glum antihero, A Somewhat Gentle Man takes a little time to find its feet," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the NYT. "Until it does, you may struggle to care about Ulrik (Stellan Skarsgård), a middle-aged murderer newly released from prison. Beefy and slow-moving, quiet and ponytailed, Ulrik seems content to observe freedom rather than embrace it. His former boss (a strutting Bjørn Floberg) expects him to kill the snitch who put him away for 12 years, but Ulrik is done with violence — or so he thinks."

"Director Hans Petter Moland and cinematographer Philip Øgaard bring an often pleasing palette of sub-Arctic light and backstreet grime to the slight doings, but few of writer Kim Fupz Aakeson's gags provoke more than a chuckle," finds Bill Weber in Slant. "A Somewhat Gentle Man wraps up with an unsurprising restoration of gangland and domestic order, but its makers don't break a sweat or any new ground in the process."

"Missing the recital," sighs the AV Club's Scott Tobias. "Of all the clichés to suggest parents with their priorities out of whack, that one may be worse than excessive cell-phone use, because it isn't just a character detail, it's a whole scene. As a TV writer suffering through a midlife crisis in Every Day, Liev Schreiber misses his youngest son's violin recital while boinking a fellow scribe in her swimming pool, and that's all that needs to be said about the movie."

But for Melissa Anderson, writing in the Voice, "what distinguishes Levine's film from, say, last year's similarly themed (and irredeemable) Happy Tears is his cast — and not just reliable vets like Schreiber. Curly-haired dumpling Skyler Fortgang, as Jonah's younger brother, Ethan, offers much more than just wide-eyed cutes. But it's [Ezra] Miller, perfectly balancing teenage recalcitrance and vulnerability, who's the most exciting to watch: Following his debut in Afterschool and City Island, he's become one of the best adolescent actors working today."

With Twelve Thirty, Jeff Lipsky "crafts an odd self-contained universe in which the characters' compulsive need to explain themselves or simply hold their interlocutor's attention stands in for the meaning of the words they actually say, resulting in a film more satisfying in occasional isolated moments than as a coherent dramatic entity," finds Andrew Schenker in the Voice. For the NYT's Stephen Holden, this is a film that "loves its characters and the actors who play them. A fearless, talented filmmaking auteur working on a limited budget, Mr Lipsky insists on doing it his way and letting the chips fall where they may. More power to him." More from Eric Kohn (indieWIRE). At the Angelika in New York.

"Burning Palms, Christopher B Landon's ambitious and effective debut feature, reveals in five vignettes the fragility and desperation that lurk beneath the surface of the lives of some anonymous LA residents," writes Kevin Thomas in the LAT. "Landon's sardonic view of human nature and deft filmmaking skills — plus a raft of sharp portrayals — keep the viewer from pondering the preposterousness of certain situations and instead encourages going along with the fun." More from Andrew Schenker (Slant, 0.5/4).

Lemmy, Greg Olliver and Wes Orshoski's doc on Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister, is opening at various spots throughout the country before rolling into New York next week. The official site's got all the details. Writing for Artforum, Andrew Hultkrans finds the film "amiable, humanizing" and notes that "Lemmy’s influence cuts across several (often incompatible) genres and generations of musicians, and his understated charisma and good-hearted nature make similar films about bigger acts (the Rolling Stones, say) seem like contrived exercises in cinematic fellatio."

IN THE UK

In Sight & Sound, Sam Davies finds Gasland, "a debut feature by its writer and director Josh Fox, arresting and at times terrifying. On the surface, a documentary about hydraulic fracture mining ('franking') — the technology that pumps enormous quantities of water and toxic chemicals deep underground to extract natural gas from massive subterranean shale beds — hardly screams watchability. But, with a remorselessness all the more powerful for its quiet unfussiness, Fox builds up a riveting portrait of near-apocalyptic environmental damage and a corporate mindset willing to ruin water sources irrevocably for the sake of a few years' profit."